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ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

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Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#61

ChatGPT still does not display per-message timestamps (time of day / date) in conversations. This has been requested consistently since early 2023 on the OpenAI community forum, with hundreds of comments and upvotes and deleted threads, yet remains unimplemented. Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be displayed?

Regular people hate numbers. Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.

This makes sense only if you don’t think about it at all.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#62
post #43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What purpose does logging your lifting with chatgpt achieve?

It’s an incredible tool for weightlifting. I use it all the time to analyze my workout logs that I copy/paste from Apple Notes. Example prompts: - “Modify my Push #2 routine to avoid aggravating my rotator cuff” - “Summarize my progression over the past 2 months. What lifts are progressing and which are lagging? Suggest how to optimize training” - “Are my legs hamstring or glute dominant? How should I adjust training…

You can also export to CSV and use that file in the chat if you’re using a tracking app like Hevy.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#63
Beyond the lack of timestamps, ChatGPT produces oddly formatted text when you copy answers. It’s neither proper markdown nor rich text. The formatting is consistently off: excessive newlines between paragraphs, strangely indented lists, and no markdown support whatsoever.

I regularly use multiple LLM services including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, among others. ChatGPT’s output has the most unusual formatting of them all. I’ve resorted to passing answers through another LLM just to get proper formatting.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#65
post #33

Other than the potential liability, cost may also be a factor. Back in April 2025, Altman mentioned people saying "thank you" was adding “tens of millions of dollars” to their infra costs. Wondering if adding per-message timestamps would cost even more.

Altman was being dumb; being polite to LLMs makes them produce higher quality results which results in less back-and-forth, saving money in the long run.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#66
post #45

Surprised that people still use chatgpt

having been a customer of Anthropic and Google at varying times, it's not surprising to me in the least. As the companies sprint towards AGI as the goal the floor for acceptable customer service has never been lower. These two concepts are not unrelated.

[dead]

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#68
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular people hate numbers. Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.

> Regular people hate numbers What does this even mean

It's something extremely pervasive in modern design language.

It actually infuriates me to no end. There are many many many instances where you should use numbers but we get vague bullshit descriptions instead.

My classic example is that Samsung phones show charging as Slow, Fast, Very fast, Super fast charging. They could just use watts like a sane person. Internally of course everything is actually watts and various apps exist to report it.

Another example is my car shows motor power/regen as a vertical blue segmented bar. I'm not sure what the segments are supposed to represent but I believe its something like 4kW or something. If you poke around you can actually see the real kW number but the dash just has the bar.

Another is WiFi signal strength which the bars really mean nothing. My router reports a much more useful dBm measurement.

Thank god that there are lots of legacy cases that existed before the iPhone-ized design language started taking over and are sticky and hard to undo.

I can totally imagine my car reporting tire pressure as low or high or some nonsense or similarly I'm sure the designers at YouTube are foaming at the mouth to remove the actual pixel measurements from video resolutions.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#69
post #60

ChatGPT still does not display per-message timestamps (time of day / date) in conversations. This has been requested consistently since early 2023 on the OpenAI community forum, with hundreds of comments and upvotes and deleted threads, yet remains unimplemented. Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be displayed?

My honest opinion, which may be entirely wrong but remains my impression, is: User Engagement Maximization At Any Cost Obviously there's a point at which a session becomes too long, but I suspect a sweet spot somewhere which optimization is made for. I often observe, whether as I perceive or not, that among the multiple indicators that I suspect of engagement augmentation, is also the tendency for vital information t…

After whatever quota of free GPT-5 messages is exhausted, `mini` should answer most replies, unless they're policy sensitive, which get full-fat `GPT-5 large` with the Efficient personality applied, regardless of user settings, and not indicated. I'm fairly confident that this routing choice, the text of Efficient [1], and the training of the June 2024 base model to the model spec [2] is the source of all the sophistic behavior you observe.

[1] https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/O...>

[2] https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-02-12.html>

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#70
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular people hate numbers. Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.

Do regular people not use any mainstream messaging app - Messenger, iMessage, etc?

Both of those by default hide timestamps
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